The afternoon sun sagged pale above the village, spilling a thin warmth that never quite reached the skin. Its light washed the paths in a hazy glow, stirring faint motes of dust that drifted and settled on leaning fences and crooked rooftops.
On the far edge of the village, beyond the last row of crumbling stone walls, Lioren crouched in the dirt. His hands moved with quiet care, feeding handfuls of fresh grass to Bilu — a small gray rabbit with a single white horn curling from its forehead.
"There," **Lioren** whispered. "Eat slowly. Grandma says you're too skinny."
He didn't hear the footsteps until they were almost behind him. The shadow fell over him first, long and deliberate.
**Merith**.
Lioren's shoulders stiffened, but he didn't turn right away. He hoped, foolishly, that maybe this time Merith would just pass by.
"What's that?" Merith's voice was light but carried a weight underneath, the kind that made Lioren's fingers clench tighter on the rabbit.
"My rabbit," Lioren said quietly. "His name's Bilu."
Merith stepped closer, crouching to get a better look. His honey-blond hair caught the sunlight, his sharp blue eyes narrowing as they studied the animal. "A horned rabbit?" he said, almost with curiosity. "Didn't think you could afford one."
"I didn't buy him," Lioren muttered. "Grandma gave him to me."
Merith tilted his head. "Mm. And what if I wanted him?"
Lioren finally turned, clutching Bilu tighter. "You can't. He's mine."
Merith's lips curved into something halfway between a smile and a sneer. "Relax. I'm not going to hurt it. I'm just wondering if you've ever taken him near the prayer flags."
"No," Lioren said sharply. "Grandma says the forest's dangerous."
"That's right," Merith said, his tone almost cheerful. "Dangerous. My father says there are beasts in there that can hear your heartbeat from twenty paces. Imagine what they'd do to something small like this."
"Stop it." Lioren turned away. "I'm not letting you take him."
Merith moved fast. His hand shot out and seized Bilu by the scruff. The rabbit kicked wildly, the small horn flashing in the sun.
"Merith!" Lioren lunged, voice cracking. "Give him back!"
Merith didn't answer. He glanced toward the western ridge, where the tattered prayer flags fluttered weakly. "Bet he could make it halfway across before something noticed him."
"Don't!" Lioren grabbed for the rabbit, but Merith twisted his body just out of reach.
"Calm down," Merith said, his patience mock-thin. "Tell you what, let's make it a challenge. I throw him, you go get him. We see if you're brave enough to step under those flags."
Lioren froze. Beyond that ridge lay the forest, dark, ancient, the canopy so thick no sunlight could seep in. The elders' stories rose like ghosts in his mind. No one who entered came back. Even Bau Masters avoided going inside.
His throat was dry. "No…"
Merith's expression shifted. "You know what? Forget it. You're right. It's too dangerous for someone like you. You'd probably get lost."
The words stung, but worse was the casual dismissal in his tone, as if Lioren was nothing, too weak to even try.
"I can do it," Lioren said, more to himself than to Merith.
Merith's brow arched. "Sure you can." And with a single motion, he threw Bilu.
The rabbit tumbled through the air, a flash of gray and white before vanishing into the forest's shadow.
Lioren's heart lurched.
"Wait!" Lioren surged forward, but Merith caught his arm.
"Don't," Merith said, suddenly serious. "I was joking. You don't have to—"
"I'll be fine," Lioren said, jerking his arm free. His voice was steady, but his legs felt weak. "I'll just get Bilu back!."
He turned and ran toward the ridge, the prayer flags brushing against his cheek as he passed beneath them.
The moment he stepped under their tattered cloth, the air changed. It pressed against his chest, heavy and cold, like stone. The forest loomed before him, vast, silent, and watching.
Every tale the elders had ever whispered clawed at the edges of his mind, warning him to turn away.
But he clenched his fists, forcing his trembling legs forward, and broke into a run.
Bilu was out there, and he would find him.
The air on the other side was heavier, colder. Each step made his skin crawl, the silence pressing in like unseen hands. He swallowed hard, forcing his feet to move.
"Bilu!" he called, voice trembling.
No answer.
He moved deeper, brushing aside low branches, scanning the ground. The shadows pooled thick between the trees, and every so often, a gust of wind whispered through the leaves like a voice he couldn't quite hear.
Then he saw it.
Bilu lay slumped in the shadows beneath the twisted roots of an ancient tree, his small body barely visible in the gloom.
Lioren hurried to him, squinting through the dark, his breath quick and shallow.
He reached out with trembling hands, fingers brushing over the familiar fur
The fur was warm, but wet.
When he pulled his hand back, it gleamed dark in the faint light. His stomach dropped.
His fur was matted dark with blood, the small horn tilted at an odd angle. His eyes, once bright, were clouded and empty.
Lioren's breath caught. "No… no…"
He knelt beside the small body, hands trembling as they touched the cooling fur. "We'll go home," he whispered. "I'll take you home…"
The words barely left his lips when the air shifted above.
A pale shadow dropped from the canopy without a sound.
It landed behind him — heavy, cold, and alive.
The White Snake's coils slid around his legs before he could move, dragging him back from the rabbit's body.
He gasped, then the scream tore out of him, raw, high, and shaking. "AAAH!" The sound echoed between the trees, swallowed quickly by the dark.
The shock hit him like a hammer, freezing his small body in place.
At six years old, his mind couldn't untangle what he was seeing, couldn't escape the sudden, crushing wave of fear.
The coils tightened, forcing the air from his lungs. His fingers clawed at the slick, unyielding scales, slipping uselessly. The pale head rose before his face, black eyes as empty as the night.
"Grandma Viessa!" His voice was thin now, desperate, tears spilling freely from his wide hazel eyes.
His gaze locked onto the dim light beyond the trees, clinging to it like a lifeline.
One last, ragged breath.
"…Grandma…"
He couldn't breathe, each gasp clawed uselessly at the air. Panic tore through him as his small hands clawed at the coils, nails scraping against the snake's slick, unyielding scales. But his six-year-old body was far too weak; every thrash only tightened the serpent's grip, dragging him closer to the dark.
The pressure grew. His vision blurred.
Every heartbeat screamed the same plea, he wanted to live, to cling to that light, to keep breathing no matter what.
_I don't want to die..._
And the world went dark.
His body lay still, unmoving, his hazel eyes frozen wide, once warm, now glassy and void of light, as if the last ember of life had been snuffed out.
Seeing this, the white snake loosened its coils, the crushing grip on the boy's throat fading.
Lioren's chest didn't rise. His head hung at an unnatural angle, his hazel eyes fixed and glassy, staring at nothing.
Without hesitation, the snake lowered its fanged mouth to his collar and clamped down, its curved teeth piercing just enough fabric to hold. Slowly, it began to drag him. The boy's limp arms trailed in the dirt, his small frame jolting over roots and stones.
It was not a quick journey. The white snake's movements were deliberate, unhurried, its pale body winding forward with mechanical patience. Every few paces, it stopped, lifting its head as if testing the air, its black, pitless eyes scanning the shadows.
The deeper it went, the thicker the air became. Sounds bled in from every direction, the distant, guttural calls of unseen beasts, the crack of shifting branches, the wet rustle of something slithering just out of sight. Shapes shifted in the dark, eyes glinting from between the trees.
Yet none approached.
The forest was home to predators older and fiercer than men, but whatever dwelled in this snake's aura made them hesitate. It seeped from the snake like heat from a fire, dark, oppressive, threaded with faint crimson lines that pulsed in rhythm with a soundless beat.
Most creatures could not see the aura, but they could feel it, deep in their bones. It was a warning older than memory. One by one, the watching beasts turned away, slinking back into the black undergrowth, hiding from the thing that had entered their domain.
The white snake pressed on, deeper and deeper, until the ancient trees grew so close together that no light could pierce their canopy. Finally, it stopped before a gnarled giant whose roots sprawled outward like skeletal fingers. Beneath them, the earth had split to reveal a dark hollow, its entrance yawning wide like the mouth of something long buried.
Without a sound, the snake began to slip inside, dragging the boy with it into the damp, waiting dark
Inside, the air was thick and damp, the walls laced with tangled roots and slick moss. Silence wrapped the place like a shroud, broken only by the faint hiss of the white snake as it slithered in and coiled protectively around the lifeless form.
Slowly, the white snake moved toward Lioren's head. It didn't bite. Instead, it opened its mouth wide and released something.
From its throat came a glimmering orb, smooth and shining with a blood red energy all around the orb. It floated in the air, hovering as if held by invisible threads. A strange, powerful aura radiated from it. Inside the orb, something shifted. A hollow butterfly shell, its wings thin and translucent, its body curled and lifeless like a shed skin. Delicate, empty, waiting.
The butterfly mold pulsed faintly, as if it had been waiting for this moment all along.
With unnatural precision, the white snake used its tail to pry open Lioren's mouth, like lifting the jaw of a puppet. Then it turned back to the orb.
The white snake bit into the glowing sphere with its front fangs. It was transferring some strange, black aura that emitted crimson lines around it from its fangs into the butterfly sealed within the orb.
At once, a brilliant light surged through the hollow. The darkness vanished. The butterfly within the orb began to stir. The orb cracked open like a hatching egg, its shell peeling back to let the butterfly twitch to life. The butterfly floated gently toward the white snake's body. The white snake remained still.
As the butterfly touched the white snake's glowing scales, the white snake froze, lifeless. Its pale form dimmed, the light inside it draining away in waves. The butterfly's tiny mouth opened. It began to feed.
A quiet, eerie sound filled the hollow as the light was drawn from the white snake into the butterfly. The aura, It was a light of translucent black, yet threaded with something stranger, an eerie transparency that defied color. once hollow, now pulsed with radiant essence.
When it had taken everything, the glowing butterfly drifted toward Lioren's open mouth and slipped inside.
The moment it entered, it burst.
Light exploded through Lioren's body, racing through his limbs, flooding his chest, wrapping around his heart, his spine, his skull. Veins lit up beneath his skin. For an instant, he was glowing from within.
The light that once glowed from the butterfly faded.
Now, both the white snake's body and Lioren's lay motionless, bathed in silence.
Stillness hung thick in the air.
After a few moments of heavy silence.
A sudden, sharp sound broke the quiet. A heartbeat, fast and strong, thundering through the stillness like a war drum.
The pulse grew louder, relentless, filling the space with a fierce rhythm. It was the boy's heart, the one that had stopped when the snake choked him, now roaring wildly again.
Then his eyes twitched.
They moved.
But they weren't Lioren's hazel eyes. The ones that once shimmered with life and hope.
These were dark like the abyss, an endless void of pure, lightless black. Utterly devoid of emotion, so profound it swallowed the very concept of a pupil.
Those eyes, hollow and still, stared at the white snake's lifeless body sprawled before them.
He sucked in air like it was his first breath in centuries.
"A-ah…"
The voice cracked, as if it was his first time speaking, as he struggled to lift his arms, sluggish and unfamiliar. Deep inside his mind, a new voice whispered.
"It worked… a perfect success. Three centuries since I awoke in this world, bound to the frail body of a Hollow Snake. Life was nothing but a crawl through shadows, hiding from every gaze. If not for its natural gift to change its color to its surrounding making it almost invisible to naked eye, I would've been killed long ago. Especially with the kind of greed Bau Masters harbor for refining its rare Bau."
It was a kind of happiness, quiet, bitter, almost unrecognizable. His tone didn't carry it. His face didn't show it. Not even his eyes, which held nothing but a dark, abyssal void. And yet, deep within, it felt like a bird finally freed from its cage. A freedom hard-earned, long overdue, and heavy with the price paid to claim it.
He was once a man of Earth, ordinary, unremarkable, burdened with a life that never offered him mercy. Obstacles rose like mountains before him, and though hardship gnawed at his will, he endured. But in his darkest hour, the one person he trusted most betrayed him. That betrayal unraveled everything. Every misfortune, every wound of his life, led back to that single hand. And in the end, that same hand delivered his death.
When next he opened his eyes, he was no longer human. He had awakened in a place that was not Earth, in the cold, cramped confines of a nest. His body was alien: soft-scaled, limbless, newly hatched among others of his kind. A newborn Hollow Snake. The nest was hidden deep within a shadowed place, but the world outside was stranger still. Creatures unlike anything he'd seen roamed the land. Yet the true shock came when he saw _humans_ alive and thriving here. He had believed mankind existed only on Earth.
Stranger still was the presence of something invisible yet all-encompassing, a strange energy that flowed through the air, the soil, the water, even his own body. As a beast, his senses could see it, taste it. This was the lifeblood of the world. But he soon learned that this energy alone was not what gave beings their true strength. The power of this realm lay in **Bau**, orbs of translucent beauty, each radiating an aura that betrayed its rank. These Bau granted abilities beyond imagination, the tools of the mighty Bau Masters.
His discovery ended in blood. Not long after he was born, the nest came under attack. A group of Bau Masters descended like executioners, slaughtering every adult Hollow Snake and capturing the newborns. They carved through flesh and bone, digging into their prey to claim the heart, the vessel from which the White Snake Bau could be forged. He should have died there with the rest. But instinct and luck became his salvation. The Hollow Snake's natural gift, to blend perfectly into its surroundings, saved him. He stilled his breath, his scales shifting to match the world around him, and slipped away unnoticed.
From that moment, his life became a long, unending hunt, he the quarry, the entire world the hunter. Hollow Snakes were fragile, their bodies unsuited for direct combat. But the rarity of their Bau, capable of granting powerful illusion abilities, made them coveted trophies. Bau Masters, beasts, and even lesser men all sought his life.
At first, his heart burned with rage. Rage for the one who had destroyed his first life. Rage for the Bau Masters who had torn apart his second. He swore he would one day take revenge. But as years crawled into decades, the fires of rage cooled into something colder. His humanity, already fragile in the body of a beast, withered away. The warmth of compassion, the anchor of morality, these eroded until nothing remained but instinct and will.
He no longer cared for revenge, what meaning did it have? He had been used and killed for a single, undeniable reason: he was weak. Powerless prey existed for no purpose but to be hunted and consumed. With the mind he possessed now, had their positions been reversed, he would have acted no differently, climbing to power upon another's back, and casting them aside the moment their worth was spent. Justice? That was a fairy tale whispered to comfort the feeble. There is no justice, only power. Power is the only freedom. Power is the only law. Power shapes truth, writes history, and bends the world itself to its will.
"I will have that power. Power so complete that no hand dares reach for me. Power to take without asking… and to cast aside without a thought." And so his mind reshaped itself. Power became not a means to an end, but the end itself.
In any world, whether ruled by the sword, by schemes, or by words, power is the only law.